Problem determination involves diagnosing a problem using analysis of the events that occur in an environment and providing suitable solutions to a user or to provide automated solutions. For either of these tasks, i.e., providing solutions or automated recovery, a good understanding of the system and its working is a mandatory prerequisite. This is generally done by using Symptom Databases or other storage sources for problem causes and their solutions and whenever a problem occurs, an analysis is performed against this source to determine the solution.
However, considering a practical scenario a real-time environment would include a lot of different applications from a lot of different vendors working together. For example, a customer would have a business partner's web applications deployed on an IBM Websphere Application Server, while using Oracle as the database. This scenario has three different components (applications) from three different vendors: Websphere Application Server (IBM), Web Application (IBM Business Partner), and Database (Oracle).
Considering this scenario, it is understood that for a perfect problem determination analysis of such a system, a deep understanding is needed of all the three components. Practically, it would be impossible for any vendor to provide and maintain solutions and intelligence about some other vendor's (e.g., Oracle) applications, even though these might be used together with their products. This leads to an information “black box” where a support engineer does not have enough information or knowledge about some applications running in the environment.
From the above example, it would be easy to visualize the effort that would be required if IBM wants to provide solutions for problems with Oracle database, considering that the business partner would be providing information and symptom/solution details for their application. This would involve having a team of experts to create and maintain the solutions database for Oracle. If this is not done it would lead to a black box in the problem determination analysis performed for this environment, i.e., any problem occurring in the system would be diagnosable if and only if it is not related to the database, and any database related problems would have to be solved with the help of SME's/Specialized Administrators.